Melting the iceberg

When I wrote about the skater Rodney Mullen, I described Robert Greene’s Mastery formula as this: time x intense focus x self-confidence. Today, I prefer to write it as mastery = time x attention x ego.

Leafing through The Fighter’s Mind, I came across a page where I had written in the formula above, but with one exception. After Sheridan quotes Marcelo Garcia as saying “I never bother getting angry. I don’t need it. I don’t confuse angry with intense. I think being angry makes you tired. I perform at a high level without it,” I had added the word “grace.”

“To John, what sets the top guys apart is the idea of “relaxed poise.”“The single definitive feature of the uberathlete is a sense of effortlessness in a world where most men grunt and strive and scream. It comes easy to the best, and what creates that? I think it’s a sense of play. No fear or anxiety about their performance.”

Effortless. Graceful.

These are the words we use to describe the top performers in every art, discipline and sport when they go about their work.

Dan John, in his book Intervention, perfectly captures this in his fifth principle: “Constantly strive for mastery and grace.”

He observes that “the best performances have a silken easiness to them that defies explanation. For me, true mastery is so graceful and grace-filled that someone who is unaware of what is optimal will still appreciate the moment.”

When I started Brazilian jiu-jitsu, I was an angry ball of tension. People were trying to choke me, to make me uncomfortable, to make me submit. This was a new experience. So I reacted how we all do to unfamiliar situations: I panicked.